Analysis of a contention-based opportunistic spectrum access under general channel activity model

We investigate a distributed contention-based spectrum access scheme in cognitive radio networks where ON/OFF periods of the channel by primary users follow discrete phase (PH) type distributions. The main motivation for ON/OFF having PH distributions is that the channel activity has a more general behavior depending on the primary users' traffic. In the past most other researchers assumed that ON/OFF periods of a channel follow a geometric distribution for the purpose of mathematical tractability even though this assumption is restrictive. We propose a distributed medium access control (MAC) scheme for the secondary users (SUs) which is characterized by a constant contention window size and a method to decide whether for each SU to participate in competition or not depending on the queueing delay of a head-of-line (HoL) packet. In order to investigate the performance of our proposed MAC protocol, we construct a two-dimensional Markov chain which incorporates both the proposed MAC scheme and the general channel activity. The resulting one-step transition probability matrix of the Markov chain has a very special structure. With the help of the censored Markov chain method, we provide a computationally efficient method to obtain the stationary distribution of the Markov chain. We then obtain the system capacity, which is defined as the maximum number of SUs that can be accommodated with a quality of service (QoS) guarantee on the packet dropping probability and the packet delay. Numerical examples show that the system capacity considerably depends on the distributions of ON/OFF periods and our proposed MAC scheme achieves a higher capacity than the existing one. (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.